As integrated circuit (IC) and printed circuit board (PCB) design and fabrication techniques become more sophisticated, computer system design techniques must also become more sophisticated. This is because as IC's and PCB's become more densely populated, their performance capabilities and speeds increase and computer systems which employ these IC's and PCB's must be able to support the increase in performance. In addition, as businesses that employ these computer systems and components become more sophisticated, they demand greater performance from their computer systems resulting in increasingly densely populated PCB's and computer systems having tightly packed packages. As a result of these tightly packed packages, these PCB's and computer systems are susceptible to a variety of problems which must be considered.
For example, as components and circuits become smaller, their packaging becomes smaller thus allowing manufacturers and designers to more densely populate boards and systems. However, with the smaller packaging and more densely populated boards comes more signal interconnections with less card edge real estate available. Further, the increased signal interconnections increase the required force to make such interconnections. It has become very difficult to create enough mechanical advantage with present docking systems to overcome the high plug forces do to the increased signal interconnections. The forces in some cases are in excess of one hundred pounds which is more than the mechanical advantage available in the present systems employed.
Further, as PCB's are packaged into cassettes, and the cassettes are disposed into frames in ever larger numbers, it becomes important to make the cassettes hotpluggable, so that failed PCB's may be replaced without disrupting the performance of unfailed PCB's. This hotplugable capability means that power tools may not be used to unseat and seat connectors in the PCB's. Thus, speed in plugging large numbers of the cassettes and PCB's is needed to allow a customer engineer to accomplish the required installation of new or failed PCB's and cassettes without undue fatigue.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop enough mechanical advantage to provide the forces and travel necessary to quickly and reliably seat and unseat the mating connectors associated with connecting and disconnecting, respectively, the PCB while maintaining a compact docking cassette.